The Steady State Economy (SSE) as proposed by Herman Daly is
a great and essential idea. He defines a SSE as: "an economy with constant stocks of people and
artifacts, maintained at some desired, sufficient levels by low rates of
maintenance throughput, that is, by the lowest feasible flows of matter and
energy from the first stage of production to the last stage of
consumption."
The above definition is taken from the website of the Center for the Advancement of the Steady
State Economy (CASSE) whose webpage may be found here.
PR encourages everyone to become familiar with the SSE
because it is quite simply the only way mankind can survive! Elementary
arithmetic plus a recognition of physical reality reveals that we cannot
continue indefinitely taking resources from our planet. We are already
witnessing this overconsumption right now and it is causing social stress and deprivation worldwide… imagine what problems there will be if we pursue
economic growth for another hundred, or two hundred, or three hundred years!
The kind of economics that now dominates our thinking has no future.
But what if economics thinking itself is the root cause of
our present problems? If economics is a cause then presumably more economics, albeit
of a different kind, is not the solution.
